Proscription of Mourning

The proscription of mourning is the most pertinent characteristic of the Korean War memories. It has been caused by battlefield realities of the war (many unaccounted deaths of civilians), an ideologically charged memory process, fear-riddled bodies under censorship, and the convention of testimonial practices that mimics perpetrators’ epistemology. Although South Korea has recently opened up many memorial sites for suppressed mourners, the proscription of mourning nonetheless has been persistent and thus has continued to create an impasse of remembering. As a breakthrough of such an impasse, this chapter calls for emphatic mourning that reenacts survivors’ reflexive acts of witnessing their incommunicable trauma. Likewise, a memorial is reframed as a potential theater of empathic mourning that carries out an intangible process of the symbolic world through unorthodox signifiers such as bodies, nonverbal gestures, oralities, and even evanescent occurrences.